Stephen Crane had arrived in prose, apparently without having read Maupassant or knowing anything of the school of Flaubert, at precisely their objective method and their ironic point of view, and in poetry, at a terse vers libre which at its best has scarcely been surpassed by any of the more profuse vers librists who have since received more liberal publicity; and he managed to practice his art without any journalistic infection. — “A Vortex in the Nineties: Stephen Crane” from The Shores of Light by Edmund Wilson.